Pages

09 July 2014

She trailed off. I asked her what happened after that. If you got cooler, or something. No, it’s not like that. It’s more like--you know who your friends are, so how is Facebook going to help with that?

Mikolaj Jan Piskorski is not a teen. He might just be the exact opposite of a teen, which is a professor at Harvard Business School. Nonetheless, he and Brandi Jacobsen would have a lot to talk about, because they agree on many things, particularly regarding Facebook and what it can and cannot do. In a new book called A Social Strategy: How We Profit from Social Media, Piskorski analyzed many datasets from many companies, Facebook included. The big insight he takes from looking at Facebook’s data is that, the more friends a user has, the less active he or she is. As people amass friends, the type of content they post becomes more generic, less personal (which explains Facebook’s sudden embrace of news media). The problem isn’t that parents, siblings, and teachers are on Facebook. It’s not even that everyone is on Facebook. It’s that Facebook makes it too easy to suddenly be someone’s “friend”. In high school, you know who your friends are: They’re right there. Or as Piskorski told me, Of course teenagers hate Facebook and find it useless. In high school, you see your friends everyday!

For each article predicting the imminent death of Facebook, there is a study directly contradicting this conclusion:

While some media outlets have reported teens tiring of Facebook in favor of whatever is the latest craze, Facebook still reigns number one in both total adoption and daily usage. Many other apps are seeing extremely high usage among 2014 graduates. YouTube possesses an incredible 97 percent adoption rate. Meanwhile, 77 percent of students that use Instagram log in daily. Netflix and Pandora dominate video and music streaming, with students showing a clear preference over competitors like Hulu and Amazon Prime in video and Spotify and Beats in music streaming.